Why is digital disruption proving to be so arduous?

Once a new technology rolls onto the scene, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road – as said by the American futurist Stewart Brand. This has to be a scary thought for organisations trying to cope with digital disruption.

Over the past decade, India has witnessed tremendous digital expansion and multiple platforms and tools have emerged. SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) technologies are currently the major drivers of the digital space. Mobile internet users in India are increasing and according to a report by IAMAI and KPMG, India has the third-largest Internet user base in the world. The region has more than 300 million users, of which more than 50% are mobile-only Internet users. With this in mind, the Indian digital market has a huge online population to cater to.

Throughout the world the advance of digital technologies has been going on for several decades but why does this phenomenon continue to be so highly disruptive? In a recent report on our increasingly uncertain global marketplace, industry analyst firm Gartner calls the unstoppable advancement of digitalisation “the only certainty.”

Government, companies, and our personal lives are being more deeply penetrated by digital capabilities, opportunities, and threats. Industrial trends include servicization (the wrapping of information around physical products to create services and long-tailed relationships); personal trends include the quantified self (the ability for aspects of our personal life to be recorded and analyzed, including everything we eat and drink, our vital signs, our sleep patterns and moods, and our work patterns and communications). And governments and public-sector bodies are engaged in digital government and citizen engagement, smart cities, and driving national digital competitiveness.

This momentum didn’t gather overnight, yet companies continue to acknowledge they haven’t responded to iteffectively. In a recent survey of CIOs, Forrester Research found that nearly 80 percent rated their own organisations at the bottom of the scale in terms of digital customer experience and digital operational excellence.In an era where global competition demands that companies be agile in response to change, that figure is astounding.

So why is digital disruption proving to be so arduous? It affects organisationsand their customers on multiple levels.Speed is one area. Digitalisationhas accelerated both the pace of innovation and the customer’s demand for what is new. At the consumer level, just consider walking into your local mobile phone store. Do it today and do it six weeks from nowand look at the difference in products on display. For manufacturers producing to meet this hunger for something different, the pressure to innovate is extremely high and rising. At the enterprise level, enterprise solution providers such as Epicor face similar pressure to rapidly bring new tools and applications to our customers.

Ancillary to speed is increased competition. By obliterating traditional barriers to entry, digital disruption ratchets up competition by factors previouslyunimagined, making markets more fluid and volatile. As “the only certainty” has marched forward, the understanding of whom you are competing with and where they are coming from has become less certain.

In terms of infrastructure, the way organisationsshare and leverage information internally and externally will increasingly shift to multi-channel execution, integrating across all channels and platforms necessary to compete effectively. For enterprises, particularly in the customer service space, mobile and social can be expected to move to the center of the support experience. Collaborative technologies can be expected to appear across the breadth and depth of an organisation’s value chain, all the way to the customer.

For CIOs, managing organisational transformation to meet the new demands (e.g., speed, proliferating competition) of digital disruption is a huge issue. When you consider the core skillsets and resources that currently are at hand, and then look to where digital technology is going, what becomes clear are huge gaps between “what is” and “what needs to be.” The challenge is how to support the current situation while positioning the organisation for the future. Meeting that challenge requires a kind of strategic pivoting between those points, bringing in needed talent for the future without breaking things as they stand now.

This challenge will have global implications as companies turn to new markets for new capabilities.In our case, we are transforming our operations, meeting the need for digital skills that will have a shaping effect. Today we’re in the early stages of transforming our (IT) team to blend digital skill sets to our overall resource mix. In particular, bigdata must also be part of the digital disruption conversation, because much of what the digitally driven business is doing is generating massive amounts of data. How will it be managed? The fact is that the skills and resources we need to transform the business—to make our products better and take them to the next level—aren’t as readily available at the scale needed in many of the markets we’re in today.

Specifically in the enterprise software sector, the progressive technologies companies need to leverage as they transform into more of a cloud-or SaaS-based provider are often more readily available and less expensive to access in India than in traditional markets such as the United States, Canada, and the U.K. As such, companies like ours are expanding our presence in India.

In India as well, to adapt to the ever-changing digital world, businesses must find the right partners. These need to be scalable, yet understand the local markets and how to operate effectively on digital platforms.

Globalisation strategies will be less driven by having production in low-cost locations than shaped by the need to find digital resources to overcome the challenges of disruption as companiestransition from the second industrial revolution to the third: the age of digitalisation. Digital disruption is the defining characteristic of the transition period we are now experiencing, which continues to be uncomfortable as technology steamrolls on.

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETCIO.com does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETCIO.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organisation directly or indirectly.

Mark Mincin is Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Epicor Software Corporation.Most recently Mincin held roles of CIO and VP of Operations at Caradigm, a joint venture between Microsoft and General Electric, where he played a key role in identifying and deploying core business services in the cloud. He has held IT executive management roles with Microsoft, AT&T Wireless and NASDAQ.Mincin graduated from Virginia Tech with a Bachelor of Science In Marketing and Management, with a m nor emphasis in Computer Science.

Mark Mincin is Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Epicor Software Corporation.Most recently Mincin held roles of CIO and VP of Operations at Caradigm, a joint Show more.. venture between Microsoft and General Electric, where he played a key role in identifying and deploying core business services in the cloud. He has held IT executive management roles with Microsoft, AT&T Wireless and NASDAQ.Mincin graduated from Virginia Tech with a Bachelor of Science In Marketing and Management, with a m nor emphasis in Computer Science.